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Recently I read that some Autistic people dislike fluorescent light bulbs because they can detect the light flickering, where as most other people do not. Although I support Australia's desire for greater energy efficiency, it seems a shame that so many could be adversely affected by this decision. Are there any alternatives for more stable light sources? DC lights and power supplies perhaps?

(I'm not autistic myself, but I hate fluorescent light sources).

Here is the source of this info.

Are you saying that the concept of 'Autism Spectrum Disorder' doesn't exist?

Of course not, the concept of walking through walls exists since there is more empty space in my body and the wall, but in my experience people don't walk through walls.

rocking back and forth in chairs

This is a symptom of a psychological problem, not a neuroligical one. Its very common for humans, especially those when psychologically hurt to rock back and forth. However, most humans grow out of that kind of behavior with socialization by the time they reach 9-10 years old, but some still do this kind of behavior when they are alone. Is there documentation of Bill Gates rocking back and forth in a chair as an adult in public? If so, then he has some pretty strong psychological problems. I've known people with mild terrets syndrome that could control their chirps and whatnot in public, but it wasn't worth their energy to do so with friends.

Oh, and what about Temple Grandin?

She is the poster child for autism, Asperger's, or something. After all, she has a PhD, and people that sell books for a living http://www.fhautism.com/ created a website for her, http://www.templegrandin.com/ so she must have it, or something right?

On her own, personal website, http://www.grandin.com/ she says she has a visual thinking problem _like_ some people that were not clinically diagnosed with autism here http://www.grandin.com/inc/visual.thinking.html .

Here is an interview with her where the editor and interviewer say over and over again she has autism, but the only instance where she says anything remotely that she has autistic-like features is "I can remember, after lunch, I had a rest period when I could revert to autism, and I would pick the fuzz off the rug and eat it, and dribble sand through my hands -- I can remember just getting hypnotized doing this. If I had been allowed to do that all day, I wouldn't be here now." If I had an child whose only problems in life were picking fuzz off of the rug and eating it, I would be grateful.

Here is another account by her regarding here visualization problems. http://www.autism.org/temple/visual.html In this article she alludes that she has autistic-like features, and to overcome these she says "I describe a squeeze machine I constructed to satisfy my craving for the feeling of being held. The machine was designed so that I could control the amount and duration of the pressure. It was lined with foam rubber and applied pressure over a large area of my body."

Now, I don't know how old she was when she created this squeeze machine, but this puts her in at least a 1 in a million category here. I've known people to make machines like robots and things as adults for intellectually stimulating (again about 1 in a million here, maybe 500,000) but I seriously doubt that any females I know have built a stimulating machine (most likely a vibrator) over buying one.

I will put Temple Grandin in at least a 1 in a million category, but being that nobody of authority, including herself definitively says she has autism, and being that over 99% of those with autism cannot speak, I would say its safer to say she is not autistic.

One thing I find missing from the discussion is sensitivity to light. According to this site autism and light sensitivity go hand in hand. If autistic people are more sensitive to light, could it also be vice versa, i.e. that children that are sensitive to light risk being affected and turn autistic because of too much exposure to the flicker of the television screen. So, the obvious question the researchers should ask now is if autism is more related to old-school tube tv's rather than plasma or lcd screens? I know first hand that f.ex. people with tourette can be sensitive to light and their ticks increase by watching tube tv's, but not when wathcing plasma or lcd screens. Anime-shows on japanese television have been known to cause epileptic seizures (light flicker, bright colors, ultra fast editing). So if there is a correlation between watching television and turning autistic, it has to be somewhere along those lines.

You probably can find statistic evidence showing that those that read a lot of books usually wear glasses. So do books cause bad eye sight? No, probably not, inadequate reading light etc. is more likely to have an effect.

Actually, that's not too far from one of the existing approaches:

Hug Box

I suspect many math-related geniuses have some form of high-functioning autism - the "absent minded professor" is more than a cliche. However, Asperger's is only one of many forms of high-functioning autism - well known because it has specific associated behaviors. As the site says: "Sometimes people assume everyone who has autism and is high-functioning has Asperger's syndrome. However, it appears that there are several forms of high-functioning autism, and Asperger's syndrome is one form." I'm sure there are may ways the brain can be differently wired that don't produce social disfunction, and so aren't studied, and many unusual but useful mental abilities that show up as a result.

Adam Smith (the economist) once fell into an open manhole while walking with friends - so lost in thought he failed to avoid an obvious and immediate threat to his safety. Brilliant, but beyond absent minded.

I remember watching a documentary or two about autism and something that was repeatedly found was that as an autistic individual tried to remedy their problems with autism (usually getting better with age) their savant like knowledge began to deteriorate. I have always thought that there is almost a finite amount of brain capacity any one individual is able to have. Meaning, while a savant is able to have incredible knowledge of some things, their brain is so devoted to that knowledge that things, like knowing where the silverwear drawer is, get sacrificed.

The capacity of the brain is functionally unlimited. Look up one of the various amazing people who memorized large amounts of trivial facts as an example. If there is a limit to human knowledge, no person has ever reached it, and that includes Euler. So that's not very plausable.

I've read the same facts about the loss of savant abilities, but depending on the context, you may not have learned that the specifics related to the loss of autistic powers generally concerns young people who lose one or more amazing feats as they learn to function socially (functioning socially or learning language almost always is associated with the loss of savant abilities: see google.) Since the gain of one skill and the loss of another are so closely related, this seems to suggest a finite processing power in the brain and maybe some plasticity in its parts, not a finite capacity of knowledge.

Even more specifically, a savant's inability to find the silverware drawer or dress himself likely relates to his cerebellum, which differs from most of ours. My favorite intiutive concept for the cerebellum is "rhythmic autopilot." As we learn procedural tasks and are conditioned to react in various ways, this automatic processing is largely taken up by the cerebellum. It's the conditioning/feedback loop center of the brain and hence governs movement, speaking with others, automated responses to stimuli, and all procedural knowledge. They can't find the silverware because their brains don't click into autopilot when performing these activities. So what seems trivial to us, like getting dressed, is essentially a new task for them every day. Could you imagine having to navigate your world through facts, unable to learn the rhythms of automated procedures we take for granted hundreds of times a day? And, as we'd expect, the autistic also often have differences in their cerebellums: click here for more. Here's a quote from a page of the functioning of the cerebellum, which has an excellent section describing its function (it uses a computer metaphor, so you guys might wanna check it out). Quote:


The skills involved in human communication, for example, require both motor and mental activity: the motor activity of speech or gesture, and the mental activity that formulates what is to be said. In the course of learning these skills, an individual's performance can be improved incrementally through practice so that the skills eventually can be performed without conscious attention to detail. For example, in recalling words stored in the memory, the activity can be performed without conscious attention to the details of how the words are selected by the brain during the retrieval process.

In social interaction, we take for granted automatic signals like voice tone, body language, or even the specific words we're using (I've never met anyone who thought over every word every time they spoke). My guess is that the plasticity of the brain allows the unused sections in autistics that are normally used for activities like social interaction to adapt for other uses, hence generating the autistic ability. When these brains are rightfully claimed by their social or lingusitic origins, the computing power is lost and the sa

What if I was a savant and by listening to a piece of music once, I remember it for life. Have I made a copy?

75% have below-average IQs, and only about 5-10 percent are significantly above average (i.e. more than 105). Check the facts here. You can find more information on the common symptoms of autism here, here, and here.

Autism is a spectrum disorder, so your case is not out of the question, but would be exceptionally exceptionally rare. Nevermind that an IQ of 170 is approximately the top .05% of the population, so that's rare enough, but as you can see from the statistics quoted above, it is even rarer for someone autistic to be of that intelligence. Anyway, I hope you get a chance to read about the truth of autism, instead of the myths that you hold to be true.

Snicker. I've found that creationists are almost always engineers. Smart enough to want to try to reason about the world, but not smart enough to do so succesfully -- otherwise, they'd be scientists, not engineers.

Creationists, or terrorists. I first noticed this with the guy who shot Rabin - and started paying attention to terrorist backgrounds. It's scary.

Bin Laden? Former engineer.
Mohammed Atta? 8 years of engineering.

But I think you're wrong when you say they're not "smart enough". It's more that they are
a) not trained to reason about the world and
b) stuck in the 1950's vision of the engineers as the architects of the modern world.

One could speculate on links to Asperger Syndrome, but I won't sully the honourable name I'm posting under further.

"You get one idea and you have to act on it, and then, what do you know, but you've got another idea before you've finished up with the first one, and so you go for that one, but of course a third idea intercepts the second, and you just have to follow that one, and pretty soon people are calling you disorganized and impulsive and all sorts of impolite words that miss the point completely."

Autism on the other hand is the complete inability to concentrate on ANY task for short periods of time.

I work with Autistic children

From ADD.org
"You get one idea and you have to act on it, and then, what do you know, but you've got another idea before you've finished up with the first one, and so you go for that one, but of course a third idea intercepts the second, and you just have to follow that one, and pretty soon people are calling you disorganized and impulsive and all sorts of impolite words that miss the point completely."

Autism on the other hand is the complete inability to concentrate on ANY task for short periods of time. Autism is associated with Stims, self stimulatory behaviour. Asperger's Syndrome is a "mild" form of Autism that tends to affect mostly boys. Note that there is still a lack of common sense associated with this. Simply being quirky is not Asperger's.

A child with ADD is more than likely able to understand you when you tell him to "sit still, eat your dinner," while a child with Autism might just flick his fork around continuously while he's eating.

Credibility: I work with Autistic children, and ironically, have been diagnosed with ADD.

I have a feeling that the answer to this question is going to shock and dismay us all.

Actually, I read an article once on how children (boys especially) of programmers and engineers tended to display autistic behaviors, often leading to a misdiagnosis of autism. I was interested because my own nephew, at over two years old, still had not spoken one word. The doctors were heading toward an autistic condition. But the article went on to explain how even though they tend to display these early symptoms that can last from birth to five years old, they are just fine, and tend to end up very smart bordering on genius level. The most common thread under these conditions was that they were children of programmers or engineers. My brother is a programmer, so I thought it was rather interesting. (and yes I do think my nephew (who is now 6) is quite a little genius. He could read some words at two but couldn't talk. A few months in speech therapy fixed that. He bypassed kids books by age four and has been reading encyclopedia style books on anything to do with fish, bugs, snakes or animals of any kind. At 6 he can tell you what an estuary is, knows everything about anything that lives in the deep sea, will gladly explain about any 'aquatic animals' found in a zoo, including their eating and 'reproductive' habits and sound out words like carnivorous'. His hero is Steve Erwin, Crocodile Hunter, of course.

Just search for autism engineer.
Here's a clip
A couple of years ago the UK magazine Professional Engineering published an article entitled "Is there a bit of the Rain Man in every engineer?" linking engineers with children who have autism. Autistic children don't develop normal social relationships and they tend to wander off by themselves and play with mechanical things. The article said that engineers and autistic children shared various characteristics including strong visualisation skills, strong affinity with physical objects and being "less interested in social activities and communication.

Another
Simon Baron-Cohen, an autism researcher at the University of Cambridge, found that there were 2 ½ times as many engineers in the family history of people with autism.

While they may be conscious of more details of the world, that in itself is not causing problems--they just don't realize that other people are actually people "just like me" who can be communicated with, etc.

See this bit on the so-called Theory of Mind.

When my sister was diagnosed with Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome, a learning disability in which people have trouble seeing printed or written words, she was outfitted with a pair of specially colored glasses and colored overlays that she put over paper. Her doctor told us that black print on white paper is the absolute worst thing anyone can do for their eyes becuase it causes eye strain. Studies have shown that peacock blue print on a yellow background is the most beneficial combination to reduce eye strain.

The placement of your computer monitor is also an issue. It should be about 20 degrees below eye level and 20-26" away from your eyes. Copies should be at the same height and distance. Room illumination should be three times brighter than the screen background. Natural lighting is best, but for those of you without windows in your office, non-flourescent bulbs do fine. As for eye dryness, air conditioning or fans can help keep your eyes moist, as well as eye drops.

There are several exercizes you can do to strengthen and relax your eyes (thanks to Marc Grossman, OD):
1) Try rubbing your plams together until they're warm and then placing them over your eyes for one or two minutes.
2) Hold up a pencil about 6 inches from your eyes. Focus on the pencil, and then on something further away. Repeat about 15 times.
3) Scan your eyes from right to left and then back again across the room.
4) Roll your head around on your neck every once in a while. This reduces tension in your neck, shoulder, and scalp muscles.

Aren't there a few people who can do this already?
They are commonly called Idiot Savants but the more PC name is Autistic Savant.